A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  Afterwards, she admitted to Miss Montgomery her own reasons for deploring such a publication. There might be in time a kind of argument over whose account of their marriage should prevail: hers or Lord Byron’s. She had as a resource nothing like his facility of expression, but she enjoyed, at least in private circles, the advantage of being ‘on the spot’. She had high hopes that the quiet blamelessness of her life, and what she called ‘the eloquence of her silence’, would convince even her greatest detractors of her point of view. ‘I have sacrificed,’ she said, ‘self-justification in a great measure to Augusta’s salvation. It may be, however, that that sacrifice will on its own prove gently persuasive.’ Mrs Leigh herself threatened to become more voluble, but she was, Annabella supposed, so conscious of being ‘in her debt’ (as a practical matter, she owed Lady Byron several hundreds of pounds) that even her confused sense of gratitude might be reliably appealed to, to effect her saviour.

  Miss Montgomery was accustomed to letting her friend talk: there was no one else, after all, in whom Lady Byron allowed herself to confide. But she offered, for once, a contradiction. ‘I used to admire your own eloquence when it was a little less serene and a little less silent. Your conversation, I believe, was generally considered an ornament to good society, and much sought after. You used to like to talk, and people liked to listen to you.’

  ‘Now,’ Annabella said, not in the least abashed by such praise, ‘they only like to stare and gossip about me to my face. I have grown tired of all company but my own—and yours, my dear. Besides, it requires too much exertion to keep up the character of a saint. At least you, who know what a sinner I am, will think so.’

  There was nothing Mary could add to this. Annabella’s vision was large enough, and she showed, after another pause, just how far she did see. ‘I have been touched, I can all but feel it, with posterity. It is just like walking through a sleeping house in the dark. It makes one quiet; it makes one careful. I want to be very sure, you see, of the noises I make. They are liable to sound rather loud. I can’t pretend, however, that I’m not enjoying myself: one can say so much with so little. And Lord Byron made me feel rather painfully just how little, by comparison, I have to say. You needn’t contradict me. I know perfectly well how great a difference there is between little and nothing.’

  Occasionally, she received from her husband, without the mediation of Augusta, a personal letter. To prove what quantities he was capable of, she had only to add up the pages. It amused her after all those years to hear again the brisk discursive prattle of his daily life. ‘I may as well,’ he once said to her, ‘if I write you at all, write much as little.’ It was just, she confided in her diary, like reading the weather: it was all very colourful and real; it bore sometimes violently upon oneself; and yet there was nothing at all that one could do to . . . influence it. This was, she discovered at some cost to her vanity and still greater to her peace of mind, not quite the case. He offered once, amidst his rambling news, to attempt a reconciliation, if only for Ada’s sake. The child was then four years old. He had sent Annabella a locket and asked her to return it with a clasp of his daughter’s hair—and one of her own, too, if she still cared for him. For a week she hardly dared to get out of bed; she was nerveless with fear. At the end of it, she rose and sat down at her desk to write a single line, which she dispatched at once to him through one of their intermediaries (she never answered his letters directly): ‘Lord Byron is well aware that my determination ought not to be changed.’ By the time, however, that she confided the matter to Miss Montgomery, she was placid enough to make a joke of it. They had not, she believed, been terribly happy together. Besides, it rather irked her than otherwise, the idea that he might add to her memories of him. She had, she supposed, she said with a laugh, more than enough already.

  After that, he fell quiet; even the stream of his letters to Augusta dried up. His verse continued to appear, but no matter how closely she read it, she struggled to find in it the least reference to herself. ‘I’m afraid I shall at last,’ she said to her mother, ‘be suffered to drop into obscurity!’ Thank God, was Judy’s reply. It was one of their final reconciliations. Lady Milbanke died at Kirkby in the winter of 1822, and Annabella’s inheritance, which was considerable, included not only her mother’s name but a certain measure of her piety, too. She began to interest herself in the prison question; she began, the capitals were her own, to Do Good. Sir Ralph, who had, after the death of his wife, learned to number himself comfortably among his daughter’s dependants (these included, to various degrees, Ada, Augusta and Augusta’s children, and several of her mother’s former servants), once said to her that for someone who had suffered so much, she had kept her wonderful air, he had always admired her for it, of being untouched—by time, he wanted to say, though time was not quite what he meant. They were playing chess in the kitchen of their house at Seaham, which went largely unoccupied for much of the year and was difficult to keep warm. She declared that he was attempting to distract her with flattery that was not quite flattery; but after placing her piece, she indulged her own appetite for self-reflection. ‘My natural feelings,’ she said, ‘create a sort of scepticism as to my ever having been injured by anybody. I think that the harmlessness of my life is its chief, though not brilliant, quality.’

  ‘My love,’ he said, his large face reddening, ‘you have many more brilliant qualities than that. There was never any clearer proof of what that man has done to you than to hear you parade such a nonsense of modesty.’

  She had never known anyone, she answered, who had taken her own measure more precisely; he need have no fears for her vanity. But he would forgive her for adding, that she had been made too intensely aware (a fact for which she was not ungrateful) of the nature of true brilliance to keep much faith in her own. During their honeymoon at Halnaby, Lord Byron had permitted her to transcribe a number of his verses, fresh from the pen, as it were; and this insight into his genius had given her the sharpest context for her own. There was nothing, it turned out, that she understood better than herself. Her thoughts depended on a very narrow range of ideas. The most that she was guilty of, perhaps, was repetition. She tended to sacrifice liveliness for the sake of correctness. The quickness, or mobility as Lord Byron sometimes called it, that made his mind as various as the world, that enabled him to see, to express, to persuade, at a single stroke, had always been lacking in her. She had, however, other qualities, which she supposed were just as good. At least they had proved more durable than brilliance might have.

  The following autumn, she received her first letter in many years from Lord Byron. He was about to set off for Greece, to whose liberation he had pledged to devote his life. The scenes in which he intended to make himself useful were more isolated than those he had become accustomed to living amongst. Could he persuade her, as a rare favour, to send him a portrait of Ada’s mother, to soften the effects of his reclusion? He had been very sorry to hear (the news had only just reached him) of the demise of Lady Milbanke. She had had in her possession, he believed, a miniature of her daughter painted by Hayter at the time of her coming out. It captured perfectly just how she had looked when he met her; that is, just how she had looked before she met him. It was entirely like Lord Byron to conceal within the tenderest appeal a few subtle barbs, but Annabella, for once, was willing to disregard her own capacity for subtlety. Sir Ralph found it for her at the back of a chest of drawers, in which he had thrown together those relics of his wife that he hadn’t the heart to throw out. Annabella, without so much as a line of commentary, sent it to Byron.

  Chapter Ten

  THE NEWS OF HIS DEATH REACHED HER, as a great deal of his news had done, through the press. She was staying in Beckenham with a friend of her mother’s—she had lately begun to treat them quite as her own—and the papers were brought to her in bed with a pot of coffee and a pile of buttered toast. She sat up to read, aware that the woman who served her had lingered and st
opped by the doorway. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, to dismiss her, when her eye alighted on the page. ‘Lord Byron Dead’, it declared in thick ink. ‘Thank you,’ she repeated to the maid, ‘that will be all,’ and waited till she was gone to read:

  The poet Lord Byron has died at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April, of a fever. He had been sent as an emissary of the government to expedite the liberation of the local tribes from Turkish rule. William Parry, who had served his Lordship in the capacity of firemaster, reports: ‘At the very time Lord Byron died, there was one of the most awful thunderstorms I ever witnessed. The lightning was terrific. The Greeks, who are very superstitious and generally believe that such an event occurs whenever a much superior, or as they say, a supreme man, dies, immediately exclaimed, “The great man is dead!”’

  She lay in bed for an hour or two; the late spring day grew bright then hazy in her window. When she arose, slowly, at last, she sat down at her writing-table and composed a short note to Augusta: ‘I have no right to be considered, but I have my feelings. I should wish to see any accounts that have come. Please pass on my interest to Hobhouse and anyone else with whom you are in contact. God bless you.’

  These more personal reports began after a few days to arrive; by this time she had returned to Wilmot Street. She could not bear, she said to Miss Montgomery, the company of strangers, and Lord Byron’s death had had the unaccountable effect upon her, with a few exceptions, of making even old and intimate friends appear indifferent and strange. Mary, she added, with a touching smile, was one of these exceptions: she had known them both together, after all. She should like to see Augusta again, when she was ready; she was not ready yet. In the meantime, she pored over everything that was sent to her, and though she never left the house (nor Mary’s own parlour, very often), she dressed meticulously each morning in black and was careful to eat what she could. One of the first things she had done on arriving in Wilmot Street was to send for a tailor. The May weather was brilliant and blue. Day succeeded day cloudlessly, and the light fell through Mary’s large windows and managed to make of Lady Byron’s mourning weeds a positive colour. She looked at times, in a slant of dust, a very rich green; she looked almost verdant.

  Lord Byron at least had died, as Augusta put it, ‘in very good company’. It made his widow smile: she meant, Annabella joked to Miss Montgomery, that there had been no women present. Among the reports that Hobhouse passed on to her was an account by one of his old Italian friends, a man named Gamba. The poet, he testified, in his final delirium, had wandered continually between English and Italian. It seemed very strange, Annabella remarked, that he should rave in Italian, he had always raved so happily at the English; but then she remembered (they quietly counted it up) just how long he had been away. It was more than eight years since she had seen him, and almost as long since he had left England behind. Gamba, it seems, she added, reading on, was the brother of that woman the countess with whom Lord Byron had contracted a final liaison. There had been some talk, a few years before, of arranging for a divorce to accommodate in him a second marriage. Nothing had come of it. His first experiments in matrimony must have dissuaded him from attempting a second; but his Italian, at least, had sufficiently improved that Lady Byron was required to refer to a dictionary to puzzle out some of what she called ‘his famous last words’. ‘Io lascio cosa di caro nel mondo’ she read out to her friend, taking, in spite of herself, a certain pleasure in the rich strange phrases. ‘There are things,’ she said slowly, ‘which make the world dear to me.’

  Mary, as the first week wore on, congratulated her friend on her decent and dignified reception of the news. ‘I have had,’ Annabella answered, ‘a reasonable interval to accustom myself to his absence. Besides, a decent grief is all I feel that I have a claim to.’ She was conscious, if anything, of just how little had changed. Indeed, she felt securer in what she called ‘her knowledge of her husband’. His dying struck her almost as a gesture of intimacy; it had revived old impressions, which he himself was now unlikely to contradict. When Lizzy came in one morning to announce that a man named Fletcher, of a rough mechanical appearance, had called to see her and was waiting outside, Annabella told her to send him in: it was only Lord Byron’s valet. Mary, with her fine sense of deference, excused herself and left Annabella to wait, with her hands folded on her lap and a real appetite for the news she supposed Fletcher would bring. It was almost as if, she reflected, someone had come to talk to her about herself. Her vanity seemed obscurely flattered by the continual private application of what was, after all, a very public piece of mourning.

  Fletcher himself, however, struck a wrong note. He was not quite what she had remembered him to be, or rather, his appearance aroused in her other memories less flattering to her complacence. She had known him, it could only be said, at the worst, and his hanging arms and square stubborn face wore an aspect, it almost seemed to her, of her own former misery. Nevertheless, she rose bravely to greet him and said, as much perhaps to reassure herself as him, ‘I have always thought of you with kindness.’ To which he, with his head ducked to one side, from the back of his throat distinctly replied: ‘For my part, I’ve always remembered you with pity.’ She offered him a seat, which he refused; and she rang for tea, which he also refused. Lizzy stared at him and made Annabella feel the shame of being forced to interest herself in so undistinguished a guest. He had little enough to tell, he said, and he hoped to tell that little quickly. He had only just returned from Greece, where he had ‘served’ (his taste for what seemed to him a legal exactness was only sharpened by high company) ‘as a witness’ to Lord Byron’s death. He was willing to answer all questions respecting that event: he had got used to curiosity.

  Indeed, he seemed to expect it, for he continued almost unprompted and with a certain air of rehearsal. His lordship had at the beginning of April contracted a fever, for which, since it persisted unevenly for several weeks, his doctors had proposed to bleed him. His lordship was always very stubborn; he had refused. The doctors—there was a regular crowd of them, including the Italian, Bruno, who had come on from Genoa, and an Englishman, Millingen, sent by the committee; one of them was the Pasha’s own attendant, a small grubby pale sort of fellow named Vaya; another, a German gentleman from the artillery corps, a Dr Treiber, very tall and weak-chested, who complained steadily of the heat—were allowed in to see him on the condition that they held their noise. It was Fletcher’s job to throw them out if they didn’t. Lord Byron’s hands and feet by this time were cold as stone. The doctors gave him something for his thirst (he was very thirsty) and stuck two blisters against his thighs. He wouldn’t let them near his feet—‘as I believe you remember, miss,’ he added. It struck Annabella for the first time just how miserable the poor man was, and that his refusal to sit or look down and his general air of delivering himself of a duty tediously prepared were his only defences against a complete and abject collapse.

  On the morning of the 18th, Lord Byron began to give way to fits of delirium. In his calmer moments, when he could be heard, they just made out an expression that he was willing to be bled at last, and Dr Bruno applied the leeches. What they took out was two pounds of blood, but it was too late. He was talking a great deal, though not much to the point: a lot of Italian gibberish, as Fletcher put it, though some of it English. He thought he was leading a battle charge sometimes and cried out, ‘Forwards—forwards. Courage—don’t be afraid . . .’ There was also an old witch, he imagined, in the neighbourhood, who was giving him the evil eye; he wanted her to be brought to him. He supposed, as he said, ‘he would out-stare her yet’. Annabella could not help but reflect uncomfortably on the possibility of an allusion; Fletcher, however, distinguished his story with no sort of pause. Between bouts of bleeding, they offered him purgatives, and he was continually relieving himself: the air in the room was very sour, and thick with people besides. There were the doctors, Bruno, Millingen, Vaya and Treiber, and the young Greek gentle
man with the long name, who was called the Prince. There were Gamba and Parry, the fire-master, and Tita, his manservant, and no women at all, only Luca, who was just ‘one of his lordship’s boys’ and very bored. He had to be bribed by sweet things to stay by his master’s bed, for Byron doted on him. But it was Easter Sunday, and he was wanting to see the parade. The Prince at one point left to lead the soldiers out into the hills; he didn’t want the master to be disturbed by their salutes. Nobody slept; nobody ate. His lordship was talking steadily, most of it nonsense, but they all crowded round to hear, which is just, in a way, what he had come to see her about. His master, Fletcher said, during what he called ‘one of his quieter ravings’, had particularly wished him to say to Lady Byron—and at that point for the first time he stopped for breath.